Skylar Mae says she clears $1M a month on OnlyFans. The median creator makes $200.

Q: What is the OnlyFans platform fee?

OnlyFans charges 20% . Creators keep 80% of gross. The fee is the same whether a creator earns $200 a month or $1 million a month, which is why top earners feel it as a rounding error and the median creator feels it as the single biggest line item in their business.

Q: How does Fanvault compare on fees?

Fanvault's platform fee is 8% , so creators keep 92% . Among the named competitive set, Fanvue charges 15%, Passes charges 10% + $0.30 per transaction, and Fanfix charges around 20%. Fanvault also bundles a storefront with auctions for authenticated memorabilia, paid DMs, paywalled posts, wishlists, and a Telegram-based automation layer in a single account, none of which OnlyFans offers natively.

Skylar Mae, a 21-year-old former dental student, told HuffPost UK on June 5 that she now clears roughly over $1 million a month on OnlyFans, three months after launching her account. The same week, fresh industry data confirmed the median creator on the platform takes home under $200 a month. Both numbers are true. They are also, awkwardly, the same story.

⚡ Key Takeaways

Skylar Mae told HuffPost UK on June 5 that she now clears 'roughly over a million dollars a month' on OnlyFans, three months after launching the account.
She funneled ~9 million existing followers (4.5M Instagram, 1M+ TikTok, 1M+ X) into the paid product. The platform didn't make her, the audience did.
Meanwhile, 70% of OnlyFans creators earn under $200/month, the top 1% capture 33% of platform revenue, and the top 10% capture 73%.
OnlyFans grossed $7.22B in fan spending in 2024 and paid $5.80B to creators. The pie is getting bigger AND more lopsided at the same time.
Mae's tax bill alone runs $3.6M/year. The average creator nets ~$131/month after OnlyFans' 20% fee.
Audience capital decides the top end. Platform fees decide the middle. Fanvault charges 8% vs. the 15-20% standard in its competitive set.

What actually happened?

Mae, a former dental student, told HuffPost she funneled roughly 9 million social followers (4.5M on Instagram, 1M+ on TikTok, and 1M+ on X) into a paid OnlyFans account she launched earlier this year. By her own account, she hit her first million-dollar month within 3 months, per a profile in LA Weekly. She had previously told Unilad in March that her annual tax bill alone runs $3.6 million, and that she now pays her parents $18,000 a month as a return on their early support.

None of this is leaked or estimated. It's all on record from Mae herself. That makes the data point unusually clean for a creator-economy headline: a named creator, a named publication, a publicly disclosed monthly figure, and a follower funnel anyone can audit on her public profiles.

Why does this matter for creators?

Because the OnlyFans top end and the OnlyFans middle are not playing the same game. New CreatorRated figures show the platform's top 1% of creators capture 33% of all revenue, and the top 10% capture 73%. Meanwhile, 70% of creators earn under $200 a month, and SuperCreator's analysis pegs the average net around $131 after the platform's 20% cut.

Strip out the celebrity-tier accounts and the platform looks less like a creator economy and more like a leaderboard with a long tail. Skylar Mae isn't beating the platform, she's making it irrelevant. Anyone arriving with 9 million pre-monetized followers can absorb a 20% fee, a self-managed storefront, and the workload of a one-person business. The other 99% can't.

"I'm making roughly over a million dollars a month right now, which still feels surreal to say out loud. But I've worked incredibly hard to build this business and make it successful."
Skylar Mae, OnlyFans creator, HuffPost UK

What's the bigger picture?

OnlyFans itself has never been bigger. The platform grossed $7.22 billion in fan spending in fiscal 2024 (up 9% year over year) and paid $5.80 billion to creators, per Variety. Creator accounts grew 13% to 4.634 million; fan accounts grew 24% to 377.5 million. The pie is getting bigger and the distribution is getting more lopsided at the same time, which is the actual headline.

That's the structural story HuffPost only half-told. Audience capital, not platform mechanics, decides outcomes at the very top. Mae walked in with a pre-monetized 9-million-person audience, so a 20% OnlyFans fee functions as a small surcharge on revenue she already owned. For the 70% of creators below the $200 line, that same 20% is a tax on income they're barely generating, charged on top of every other cost of running a creator business alone.

What does Fanvault think?

The Mae number isn't a problem, it's a clarifying signal. The top of the creator economy will always find ways to monetize the audience it already commands. The real question is what the unit economics look like for the next tier down: the creator with 50K followers, not 9 million, who actually feels every basis point of fee.

Fanvault charges an 8% platform fee against the 15-20% that defines its competitive set (Fanvue at 15%, Passes at 10% + $0.30, Fanfix near 20%), which leaves 92% with the creator. It pairs that with a Telegram-and-chat automation layer plus a built-in storefront for memorabilia and limited drops. None of that fixes the audience-capital gap at the top. It just stops compounding a 20% fee against the creators who haven't yet earned their first $1,000.

One creator made over a million dollars a month last quarter. Seven out of every ten OnlyFans creators didn't crack $200. The next platform that wins isn't the one with the loudest top-end story. It's the one worth choosing before you have 9 million followers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does the average OnlyFans creator actually make?

Per CreatorRated and SuperCreator data, the average OnlyFans creator earns roughly $131 a month net after the platform's 20% cut, with the median around $180-200. About 70% of all creators on the platform earn less than $200 in a typical month. The top 1% capture 33% of all revenue, and the top 10% capture 73%.

How did Skylar Mae build a $1M/month OnlyFans account in 3 months?

She didn't build it on OnlyFans, she built it on Instagram, TikTok, and X first. According to her HuffPost UK interview, she had roughly 9 million followers across those platforms before she ever opened a paid account, then funneled them into OnlyFans earlier this year. The '3 months' refers only to her time monetizing on OnlyFans, not to the years of audience building that preceded it. The social funnel is the actual product.

What is the OnlyFans platform fee?

OnlyFans charges 20%. Creators keep 80% of gross. The fee is the same whether a creator earns $200 a month or $1 million a month, which is why top earners feel it as a rounding error and the median creator feels it as the single biggest line item in their business.

How does Fanvault compare on fees?

Fanvault's platform fee is 8%, so creators keep 92%. Among the named competitive set, Fanvue charges 15%, Passes charges 10% + $0.30 per transaction, and Fanfix charges around 20%. Fanvault also bundles a storefront with auctions for authenticated memorabilia, paid DMs, paywalled posts, wishlists, and a Telegram-based automation layer in a single account, none of which OnlyFans offers natively.

What about taxes on those top earnings?

Skylar Mae has been open about her tax burden. She told Unilad her annual tax bill alone runs $3.6 million, framing it as 'paying more than five times the average person's yearly salary just in tax a month.' That's a useful reminder that gross-revenue headlines (the $1M/month figure) and take-home pay are very different numbers at the top of the creator economy.